The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (updated edition) by Doris Zames Fleischer and the late Frieda Zames is a thorough history of the disability rights movement with a clear emphasis on discrimination against disabled individuals and their many struggles to gain access to different institutions as well as to gain rights concerning health and visibility.

The book covers much information and discusses and describes a variety of disabilities and disability issues spanning over several decades. The common theme throughout all thirteen chapters is accessibility and the book centers on the issue of gaining accessibility to, for example, jobs, education, health care, buildings and public transportation.

Chapter one opens with a discussion on how disabilities have been viewed. The common thread is that disabilities have put disabled individuals in an "other" category in which disabled individuals have been seen as "less than" their nondisabled peers. Disabled individuals have also been encouraged, and expected, to overcome their disabilities and thereby become "normal". The authors also discuss the stigma of disabilities and perhaps especially so psychiatric disabilities.

A second strong and disturbing theme is that of eugenics in regards to disabilities and the authors describe how forced sterilizations of disabled people were suggested by some eugenicists. A later chapter in the book is partly dedicated to the notion of physician assisted suicide and shows how the "right to die" is encouraged much more often when addressing disabled individuals than nondisabled individuals.

The authors also heavily focus on the connection between disability rights successes and technological advances such as the invention of Braille, motorized wheelchairs, the teletypewriter and much more. Technological advances have been crucial to the rights of disabled individuals.

The opposition to disability rights and laws that encourage and demand equality for disabled individuals have been astonishing and often economic factors has been cited to keep disabled individuals out of the workforce or the educational system. Some critics have also meant that by focusing on disabled individuals, attention has been taken from nondisabled people, especially so in education. This type of resistance is astounding and therefore the book is a real eye opener.

I am confident that the book will have an impact on any person reading it and some chapters, especially the chapter on eugenics, the treatment of veterans and the testing of dangerous gases on veterans, is horrifying. A second very touching and thought provoking chapter is the one dealing with physician assisted suicide and a discussion that centers on laws that permit and encourage the "right to die", but which to many disabled individuals instead translates to, and encourages, the "duty to die".

It is difficult to claim there to be a downside to this book because it is truly well written and very informational. While reading it, although, I became curious as to the history of the language surrounding the disability movement. There has clearly been a major change in the language used to refer to disabled individuals and the disability movement. For example, early organizations referred to disabled men, women and children as "handicapped", "crippled" and "retarded". This type of language is no longer acceptable and is deemed offensive and discriminatory. There are now also concepts that deal with discriminatory language such as the notions of "disablism" or "ableism". Although "ableism" is mentioned briefly on page 73 more information would have been interesting.

A more developed discussion on the language used could also have had a second approach, namely that of viewing it from a feminist language point of view. What struck me when I read some of the quotes that Zames Fleischer and Zames presented was the used of the word he to refer to people in general. For example "It established that because a man is blind or deaf or without legs, he is not less a citizen, that his rights of citizenship are not revoked or diminished because he is disabled" (my emphasis p. 24).

It would therefore have been interesting to include a brief history of how language activism has developed. Despite this, The Disability Movement is a truly great book that is useful for a wide range of readers; those working within disability communities and organizations, in the classroom, and for the layperson interested in the history of activism and disabilities.

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